Shauna + Tim + 2 Bunnies

Friday, January 25, 2013

Wales Part Three: Stonehenge/Salisbury

Welcome to the third week of Fly Away Fridays! The last two weeks I
told you about hanging out in Aberystwyth and Liverpool. This time, we're ready to talk about a single day during our trip that made a pretty big impact on us: July 7th, 2005.

On this historical Thursday, the three musketeers (as my mom calls us) were lazying around Aberystwyth and decided to hop on a train to Salisbury, England, home of Stonehenge.

The three of us can be kind of oblivious to the rest of the world while we're together, so it took us a long while to notice that at each of the train stations we stopped at, there were signs all over signalling that all trains to London were cancelled.

We all just shrugged our shoulders and continued on our way to see Stonehenge, not really thinking that anything out of the ordinary was going on. I mean, I didn't even believe in digital cameras at this point of my life, let alone have any way of checking the news on the road in a foreign country.

So, back to Salisbury, when we got to town, we had some time to kill before the next bus to Stonehenge, so we went walking around and wound up at the beautiful Salisbury Cathedral, where the Magna Carta- one of our earliest forms of law- is kept.

And to add to our weird day, right after we saw these cute swans, we saw a dead person laying on the side of the road. True story. Don't worry, the paramedics were on their way. But the guy was all green and gross, and it freaked us out a bit!

But, we were there to see Stonehenge, and to see Stonehenge we went!

I love this photo! It shows all the various ethnicity of people who were here that day!

But back to why July 7th, 2005 was such a crazy day: This was the day that 56 people were killed in the London Underground as a result of a suicide bombing.

We were due to arrive in London exactly one week from then. Our hostel was located right next to King Cross's Station, where the bulk of explosions took place. Scary huh?

We learned of the attacks when we were on the train coming back to Wales. We immediately thought about our families at home who had no doubt heard of the attacks and wanted to hear from us, but we had no way of contacting them until we got off the train over an hour later.

It was at the very end of the day that we got back to Aberystwyth and we hastily took turns on the pay phone calling our moms, who had been worried all day long (it was late afternoon in Seattle by the time we were able to call). Thankfully we were all fine, but it was a pretty crazy day. The next morning we were leaving to go spend the weekend at Edinburgh, Scotland, which I'll tell you all about next Friday!